It was the memory of every time Kai had come to me uneasy and I had smoothed it over, and the cold arithmetic of how close my smoothing had come to killing us both.

The therapist, a patient woman who had clearly heard versions of this before, kept returning me to one point: that the danger had been built by an expert to be missed, and that the measure of a parent was not whether she was fooled by a professional deceiver but what she did the moment her child made her see.

It took me a long time to be able to hear that.

Kai got there before I did.